Category: Blog

So much for maintaining a buffer… I’m going to have to put some work in this weekend to build up again.

That being said, the comic uploads should not be interrupted in any major way; I already have next week’s pages plotted out, so if I get the inking done by the end of Saturday, I can at least have Monday’s page ready to go in time, and then build up from there. It’s not like the day job has been particularly gruelling this first month back; on the contrary, it’s been dead as a dead thing, but I’ve found myself being preoccupied with other stuff instead.

Chief among the preoccupations is the appearance of another stray cat on the factory floor. She (I think it’s a she, I didn’t get a thorough look) has taken to hiding in our Receiving storage room, as well as some extra-dimensional secret space that makes her impossible to find before 3pm most days. She’s somewhat skinny, but not 100% feral; I managed to get close enough to pet her the other day, which she accepted; she was less accepting of being picked up or held in place, which is why my right arm is a mass of scar tissue right now. Subsequent attempts to catch her have failed; I’ve brought in a carrier, some calming herbs and a bowl of food to try and tempt her out, but no luck yet. Unlike the situation with Sparrow, there is no debate in my mind about keeping this cat if we catch her: the answer is no; in our current space and financial state, a third cat is out of the question. 

That said, I still want to wrangle her up somehow so that I can get her to an Animal Anti-Cruelty League depot, where she can be looked after and hopefully adopted one day. The problem with this lies in the fact that anywhere that I could take a stray cat either doesn’t accept uninjured animals, doesn’t send out responders on the same day, or closes too late in the afternoon relative to when she shows up; it’s frankly ridiculous how hard it is to get a stray cat to a qualified safe house after 3pm. If I do manage to catch her later in the afternoon, I’d have to make a plan to house her for the night before taking her elsewhere the next day; I just want her to have a chance at a good life, like how I’ve been able to give a good life to my own cats. 

Being the obsessive, ADHD-coded worry-wart that I am, my concern for the cat has kept me from focusing on a lot of things this week; it’s a good thing I’ve been prepping and packing good lunches, or I might have resorted to buying stress-food from the petrol station again, which is on my list of resolutions to not do this year. I intend to keep my credit card free of frivolous charges, and my trash bin at work free of snack wrappers. With that in mind, the burrito-style beef wraps were a rousing success, and I have zero issues with eating them all week. The only complaint I can voice about them is that they’re very more-ish; I always want seconds after I finish one. Maybe next time I’ll make bigger wraps and pack them with more stuff, perhaps some rice like a proper burrito to make it more filling. Next week will likely be something different though; I’ve got a real hankering for some chicken again…

Not much else worth mentioning this week; anything I could properly angst over these days is still going directly into my journal so that I don’t have to inflict it upon the internet. Fingers crossed I get my buffer reestablished by Sunday’s end, and next week will start to introduce a new face or two to the Fifth Ace Showcase.

Ciao for now.

We’re almost two weeks into 2024, and I haven’t crashed and/or burned yet; I’ll take it as a good sign.

I’m happy to say that the Fifth Ace Showcase has returned and is trucking on well so far; I actually had enough of a buffer that I could schedule the uploads for the whole week, which is not something I could say since the beginning of the series. I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain the buffer at such a rate forever, the day job kind of puts a crimp in the already-slow colouring process, but considering how much I’ve been able to get done so far, I’m feeling optimistic. Issue #0 will be running all through January and February; we’ve already seen some familiar faces, we’ll be seeing a few more, but by the end of next week there will be a slew of new characters being introduced. They may or may not feature in the next upcoming stories, but if I waited to introduce them naturally, it would take years, and I don’t want to wait that long before showing them off. I’d rather whet your appetites for the wider universe by showing you what may be on the horizon rather than just telling you about it.

On the home front, we have more or less settled into our new residence quite well; all the essentials are in place, now it’s a matter of seeing how we can improve. A few natural decorations in the form of some pot plants wouldn’t go amiss out the front and back, maybe some astroturf, a few veggies and herbs growing out the back if we can manage it. The cats are getting acquainted with the area; Silver doesn’t go much further than the garden for fear of the sprinkler system, while Sparrow has already started taking his explorative expeditions beyond the perimeter fence. We were a little worried about him at first, and we still want to get a tracker tag for him just to be sure, but he went out early this morning and came back before I left for work, so he clearly knows where home base is. It’s just as well; if we tried to keep him exclusively inside for much longer he might have exploded; the little guy feels the need to roam down to his bones. Plus it means that even if I have to get up early to let him out, I can go back to bed and get an extra hour or two of sleep, which I’ve been needing for a while now.

Exercise is still being maintained; my routines would be the equivalent of a warm up to anyone else’s workout, but it’s not about bursting onto the scene and wearing out my body. So far, it’s something to get my heart rate up, and get me used to doing something in the morning; by the time the workouts start to ramp up, I’ll have gotten into the groove of being physically active before 6 a.m.; it’s all about routine building. I’m also going to be expanding my meal prep this weekend by finally making those homemade tortillas I was looking at last year; filling those with some ground beef mince, some black beans and a few onions and bell peppers… I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it, which is not hard to do, because most of my between-meal snacks have consisted of apples, lately; I need to crack out the popcorn again.

Other than that, life goes on. My fiance starts her new job next week; lucky her that she can roll out of bed and be right where she needs to be. I’m still hunting for a new job, fingers crossed that something comes along soon; in the meantime, I’ll just do what I can to keep us afloat. See you all back here next week, where I’ll hopefully have more stuff to talk about; journaling in the evenings has seriously cut down on how much I need to vent here.

Ciao for now.

Happy belated St. Patrick’s Days, or whatever that holiday that just passed was; my brain has been broiled inside my own skull for the past week, so I have no idea…

Unbearably hot weather aside, it’s been a productive first week of 2024 so far; I’m keeping up with a lot of my goals, making significant progress on others, and generally trying to do better in all things compared to last year. I did my traditional New Year’s tarot draw, and this year’s card is the King of Swords.

This card is all about intellectual clarity, decisiveness and discipline, taking the best route based on the most logical choices and holding true. In a year where I plan to better myself creatively, physically and mentally, nothing could be more significant for me right now. I’ve got a lot of things I want to accomplish this year, and shying away from them due to illogical reasons is not going to help. Though I maintain that almost melting from the heat is still a valid excuse for not getting as much stuff done as I want; I’m almost looking forward to going back to the day job next week just to hang out under the aircon.

On that note, I’ve been busy getting the first pages of Fifth Ace Showcase Issue #0 ready for upload; I’ve been putting last year’s practice to good use, rendering the illustrations in greyscale and then layering colour on top. By doing it this way, I can have a print-ready version of the page done at the same time as the digital version; if I ever get this stuff in print, greyscale is the cheaper option. The drawback is that this does take a lot longer to render than just straight colouring, especially since I’m still experimenting with the style; I didn’t get nearly as many pages done today as I would have hoped, and as I said before, the heat wasn’t helping. Despite it all, I’ll still have the first page ready for upload tomorrow, and I want to have the next three pages done before Monday; I want to get a buffer out ahead of time for a change, and this free week before I go back to work is prime real estate for building it up.

Over to the physical side of things, I have started my exercise routines for the year, and so far have no real complaints; my thighs aching is to be expected, I shouldn’t complain about that. The program I picked out is pretty simple, nothing too hectic for the first month or two, and it doesn’t wear me out first thing in the morning when I do it. In the moment when I work out, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing that much, but the fact that my thighs are aching means that something is happening. The routines will get more intense as the year goes on, but I’ll work my way up to that. Similarly, my meal prep is also going well; I currently have a freezer full of premade meals for the upcoming week. It’s mostly stuff like curries and pasta dishes, which are usually quite carb heavy, but they are also smaller portions than I usually eat; I don’t think I could ever cut carbs completely, so this is the compromise. I still feel the need to snack a lot, especially since my main meals are smaller, but once I’m out of the house again, there will be less temptation towards that.

Mentally speaking, I want to maintain a better attitude this year; I want to channel my negative emotions to productivity, and let my positive emotions colour the rest of my life. Hopefully this will result in more art and less angst in my online posting. To aid in this, I’ve started journaling again for the first time in years; it worked when I was still in therapy, so no reason it shouldn’t work now. I keep my journal next to my bed, and every night I fill a page with my thoughts on the day, some positive affirmations about what I’ve accomplished, and what I want to get done the next day; if I happen to have an inspired thought after I get into bed, it’s also on hand for me to jot it down as well. I started the journal a few days before the end of last year, just to see how it felt, and I think it’s already helping a lot; by getting the thoughts out of my head, I can see more plainly where I’m going, and get a better night’s sleep without them weighing on my mind.

So with all that, 2024 has begun on a good note, if not a terribly loud one. I’m going to keep building my momentum as the year goes on (fingers crossed), and will hopefully be all the better for it. Once I’m no longer feeling like a strip of crispy bacon, that is.

Ciao for now.

This is going to be my last blog post for the year; let’s sum it all up as best we can.

2023 has been something of a rollercoaster, physically, mentally, emotionally, and all the other -allys as well. Many highs, more than few lows, bursts of progress and lengthy roadblocks, artistic expression and artistic burnout; it’s been the full package of the good, the bad, and the less-than-attractive. But the thing about a rollercoaster is that, once it’s done speeding you along, turning you upside down and making you want to throw up, it comes to an end; the cart slows down, you lift up the seat brace, and make your way on toward the next one. But you can always stop for ice cream and a visit to the gift shop before you climb into another death-defying contraption of evil; the holiday period is my path towards the next rollercoaster.

In terms of life and living, this year was full of uncertainty. The house hunting began almost as soon as 2023 did, and we had hoped to wrap it up by June; obviously that didn’t happen. I emotionally detached myself from finding a new place to live and resolved to let whatever happened happen, since it was out of my hands and I wasn’t looking to get said hands dirty. I had enough other things on my mind and less time on my hands than others; the detachment kept my anxiety down and my spirits… I won’t say “higher” but at the very least moderately elevated in comparison. Fortunately, even if we didn’t find a new house, we at least found a new living space thanks to the efforts of my wonderful fiance; she lucked out in finding the ideal spot for the next stage of her own journey in the coming year, and I’m so grateful to still be able to share a home with her and our cats.

Artistically speaking, I accomplished more this past year than I have in a long time, even if it wasn’t as much as I had planned. Of a potential three or four issues of the Fifth Ace Showcase, I only finished two, but I’m still proud of what I was able to do with them; I tried a lot of new things, most of which worked out well, and I had fun doing so. Outside of the website, I’ve experimented with various other things, but have not kept as consistent as I would have liked; with an ever-changing sleep schedule and the inconsistency of workflow in the day job, completing things in a timely manner has been difficult. This could change if/when I find a new job, but in the meantime, I want to use my pockets of free time (at home and at work) in a more productive manner; I need to be less lenient with my deadlines and commit myself to getting specific things out at specific times. By breaking down my creative goals into smaller, manageable goals, I can skirt between them to finish the overall task more efficiently. I already have a bingo card with my art goals for next year laid out; next step will be to tackle each one, one bit at a time.

As far as my mental state goes, I’ve been improving over the course of the year; despite starting to feel cramped in our small home and stressing over several things at various times, my brain has more or less balanced out, except in one area in particular. This ties to my physical state, so let’s lump them together, “lump” being the appropriate word. I am not happy with my body; I’ve never really liked my body in general (which is probably why I also dislike having pictures taken of me), but considering that I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been and running out of notches on my belt, it’s time I did something about it. Having a bigger living space means that I can’t use the excuse of having no room to move anymore; I have to get some exercise in. I’ve been looking into workout plans, similar to what I did earlier in the year, but starting off with easier exercises and building my way up. At the same time, like I mentioned last week, I want to look into meal prep strategies so that I can eat healthier without having to cook every night; I fell asleep at 7pm last night, I was so exhausted, so having a ready-made meal for when I get home in the evening will be an absolute blessing. Combining the healthier food and consistent exercise, I may just be able to make my body lighter, and hopefully not my wallet.

So, all that being said, what does the year boil down to, and what does it mean for 2024? Well, it’s all much the same really: thank FRICK this year is over, let’s make the next one better; it’s the usual bevy of New Year’s resolutions: eat healthier, get in some exercise, work harder, find a better job, improve life all around. Hardly original, but still highly relevant, perhaps now more than ever; it’s going to take some commitment, more than I’ve ever managed to muster in the past, but commitment to goals is how you get through life, even if the goal is just to live.

With that, I’m signing off for the rest of the year; the next Bottom of the Deck post will be on January 4th, and hopefully the next issue of the Fifth Ace Showcase will begin on the 5th. Happy Holidays to those who celebrate in your preferred manner, best wishes for the New Year, and I’ll see you all in 2024; I have several ice creams I wish to consume before the next rollercoaster.

Ciao for now.

I’ve officially deleted my TwitterX account! It’s a total shitshow over there, and I don’t intend to go back; Bluesky all the way for now.

While the day job tends to slow down somewhat in December, it doesn’t halt completely, and I can only devote so much time during the work day to stuff that I’d rather be doing instead. To keep it low energy, I’ve primarily been doodling, but also working on getting some writing done; if I want to leap into the thick of it in the new year, it’ll help to have some scripts ready. I’ve laid out a bunch of things that I want to accomplish in 2024 in terms of art, and a lot of them are comics (naturally). The Fifth Ace Showcase will of course be making a return, and I’m also aiming to work on a few one-shot greyscale zines that I can print for cheap; there are conventions on the horizon, and I’d like to have a few small things to sell, even if I don’t have a table of my own.

How much of anything I’ll get done also depends on what kind of schedule I’ll be able to construct; it’s always the same thing with New Year’s resolutions: you hold up the life-changing schedule for two or three weeks and then it all collapses. In my case, I’m going to be taking into account a bunch of things that will arise with the new living space. For a start, with my longer commute, I’ll have to leave the house earlier in the morning, and I’ll be getting home later, so that will chew up a potential extra hour of my time (at least until I find a new job closer to home). On the other hand, I tend to be waking up at around 4am these days, so that leaves a little extra time to do stuff in the morning; the cats have trained me well. It’ll be a chance to potentially try some exercise challenges again, maybe get a little bit of extra artwork or writing done before breakfast; the only reason I’m not doing it now is because of lack of space. Once I have my own desk again and some room to move, the possibilities are endless.

Additionally, I’ve been looking into meal preparation strategies to cut down on time spent making food; we don’t have the biggest fridge/freezer, but with some proper stackable containers we could store quite a few ready-made meals, so I may start taking Sundays to whip up a few large meals that I can divvy up and pick from throughout the week. I don’t have any major meal plans in mind yet, but the main reason for doing this would be to discourage impulse snacking and take-aways; a lot of nights I come home and just don’t feel like cooking, so having something ready and waiting in the fridge would prevent me from spending money that I don’t have. I found a great instructional video for homemade tortilla wraps that would provide me with a week’s worth of lunches; I also learned that I’ve been folding my wraps completely wrong for years, it was a full blown epiphany! Plus, with less time and energy taken up by cooking, I can (hopefully) find it in me to spend my evenings more creatively and get more art done.

All of this is just planning, of course; no plan survives first contact with procrastination, so we’ll see how long I’ll be able to hold to it come January. In the meantime, we still have to move into the new space before all this can happen. Some team of ours won a Sportsball trophy of some kind, so in recognition of that, we have the day off tomorrow; we’ll be using the long weekend to get some cleaning done and start moving the non-essentials out of our current space. We’ve been slowly emptying out our cupboards and freezer of long-forgotten foodstuffs so that we’ll have less perishables to cart away, and once some of the stored furniture is in place, we can clear out the rest of our hoard, starting with the board games and ending with the cats. With any luck, we should be home by Christmas… nothing bad ever came of anyone saying that, right?

Anywho, wish us luck; next Thursday will likely be the last blog post for the year, as I’m planning on using the week between Christmas and New Year’s to spend time with family and not think too hard about anything else while I still can.

Ciao for now.

Holy cow, we’re in the December times already; where has this year gone?

It’s been a hot minute since I checked in here, and stuff has been happening in that time. First and foremost: we got the lease! We’ve signed, we’ve paid, and we’re moving into our new place! It’s a good thing that we’re also paid up in our current residence until the end of the year, which means we can take our time to clean up and transfer all of our stuff across without rushing around. We’re going to have more floor space, which means we can have a real dining table again, as well as our L-couch that has been in storage for five years because we couldn’t fit it anywhere else. There’s space for our desks, our board game shelf, and somehow ourselves as well; I am going to be so glad to have a kitchen that I can stand in and move more than a single step to the side. There will be some adjustments to make; our cats are going to have to acclimate to a new space, which will likely take a few weeks for Sparrow especially, and despite a slightly reduced rental fee, we will have to pay for our own electricity and gas heating now; our costs will more or less balance out, just distributed differently. The biggest shift is going to be the extended commute to work, at least an extra 15-20 minutes both ways, so the sooner I find a different job the better.

My weekends have been filled with social obligations lately, and this weekend will be no different; it’s Japan Day on Saturday, so we’ll be going out to experience some culture. It’s a natural attraction to the cosplay crowd; there are going to be a lot of anime characters wandering around, though the best I’ll be able to manage is my Japanese Spider-Man T-shirt. While going out and seeing friends can be fulfilling, as an introvert it leaves me very drained, as I mentioned last week; my social batteries especially take a lot of hits during the holiday season. It’s not all bad though; at a birthday party this past weekend, I found a new potential D&D group (purely theoretical, no confirmation yet), and just chatting about my preferences as a DM got me thinking about my homebrew world again. I’ve been absorbing quite a few third-party D&D content creations lately (the less said about mainstream D&D the better, really) and it’s helped me brainstorm a bunch of new ideas, or put different spins on old ideas that could do with a good dusting off. Whether or not I get to put these ideas into practice is a whole other fettle of kish, but they’re nice to think about in the meantime, and it keeps the creative juices flowing.

Speaking of creative juices, I’ve been trying to get into the groove of communicating with people on social media, Bluesky in particular; like I’ve said before, to grow a social media account, I actually have to be social, and what better way to do so than communicate through the language of art? I’ve taken the slower year-end work days to get some art practice in, using some of my favourite artists’ original characters to try out new techniques; I’m looking into greyscale colouring and rendering in particular, as that’ll be easier on my wallet if I ever get my comics in print again. Here’s a couple of fanart pieces that I’ve done in the past week, featuring Big Help by psudonym and Charlie by Yung Khan:

The original creators both expressed their thanks for my efforts; it’s a nigh-universal truth that creators love seeing sincere fanart of their characters, and if I can make people happy while experimenting and improving my art, all the better.

Think that about covers it for this week; if I’m not completely wiped out by next week, I might have more stuff to show for it.

Ciao for now.

Welcome to a very special Monday edition of Bottom of the Deck, which only exists because last week was so busy that I didn’t get a chance to type up anything.

The day job took up the majority of my energy last week, so I won’t dwell on it too much; the weekend was far more enjoyable, so let’s focus on that instead. It was my fiance’s birthday, and the celebrations took up both Saturday and Sunday; while my social batteries were completely drained by the end of it, it was a good time all around. We got to see a lot of friends and family, went out for dinner one night while ordering in on the other night, and there were three separate cakes throughout; all in all, fun times. Given how hectic the year has been, it was a great prelude to the holidays; Americans have Thanksgiving, we have a birthday that just happened to line up with the Black Friday weekend, so it evens out.

We also have some good news on the house-hunting front, and just in the nick of time too; like I mentioned last month, my fiance has landed her learnership as a student teacher for next year, which means we have to move closer to the school where she’ll be practising. While we continue to wait for a potential purchase to eventually come through, we have taken matters into our own hands by looking for a place to rent, and it looks like we may have found the perfect spot. This place checks off all our boxes for location, pet accommodation and affordability; we were practically ready to take it sight unseen, but we scoped it out tonight just to confirm, and are now eagerly awaiting a contract. Fingers crossed, over the course of December we’ll be able to start transferring our belongings across, so that come January we’ll be moved in and ready to take on the next stage of our lives. Plus, with a new residential address all but confirmed, I can finally take my job hunting seriously; once I can definitively say where we will be based, I can put out my feelers in a focused radius, and look for something that is more convenient for my income, my commute and my mental health. 

While life seems to finally be progressing, creativity is still in a bit of a holding pattern; it’s been hard to maintain with everything else, and at this rate the Fifth Ace Showcase might only return next year, depending on how busy December is. There’s always a lot of social obligations over the holidays, so squeezing in some “me” time can be tricky, and I don’t intend to burn myself out like I’ve done in the past. Most nights lately I’ve been playing Minecraft, Stellaris, or more recently Deep Rock Galactic to destress; funny how my game choices seem to involve digging, space, or digging in space. On the other hand, some days my creativity runs away in different directions than I want it to, and I splurge it out in the form of free writing or conceptual art just to empty my head a little; here’s a little something my brain decided to throw out last week:

It’s probably a fantasy story, it might be sci-fi, I’m not sure yet. The basic premise is that a pair of twins on opposite sides of a conflict clash for the final time, and only one of them walks away; the survivor is heavily scarred and amnesiac, and does not know which of the twins they are. Do they want to know? What happens when the people who think they know, come for them? I plotted out a first chapter, but I’m not sure where the story might go from there, or when I’ll get around to actually telling it; this is what my brain does instead of focusing on existing ideas.

So that’s what I’ve been up to instead of getting blog posts out on time; I don’t know if I’ll post again this coming Thursday, it all depends just how much can happen in the next three days. Otherwise, we’ll be back on the regular blogging schedule next week once again.

Ciao for now.

Okay, let’s not be lazy about it this week; I’ll actually talk about stuff this time.

I know, I know, still no art in sight; I’ve doodled some stuff here and there, but nothing directly related to the website; chalk it up to the regular excuses and let’s move on to other stuff.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media lately, and the requirements that it takes to become noticed on various platforms. The tricky thing is that each website tends to play by its own rules and algorithms; YouTube famously changes up their style every few months, Instagram is so invested in promoting Reels over pictures in order to compete with TikTok, and who knows what kind of horrific slurs you have to spout to even be spared a second glance on Twitter these days. For me, the latest challenge is Bluesky, and the tricky thing about this new platform is that it has no algorithm at all. There’s no magic bullet, no quickfire method of rapidly gaining followers, nothing to exploit to be seen; the only way is to post, repost and interact with others constantly and consistently, just like it used to be on other socials way back when. In other words, to gain ground on this social media platform, you have to be social. *thundercrack*

Social interaction has always been a hit-or-miss thing with me; I’m introverted by nature, and have a very limited pool of social energy that I prefer to spend on people close to me. I can handle small groups, which is why board games and TTRPGs work for me, but if I have to do it for more than a couple days in a row, I can get burnt out. Now picture trying to socially engage with hundreds to thousands of potential people in order to build a community that you deliberately want to see everything that you post online; you can see how that can be exhausting. Even trying to engage on an individual basis can be tough; I never want to come across as parasocial, even if I am genuinely not, but that’s the anxiety talking again.

I used to want to try and post something online every single day; that quickly went nowhere, partially due to workloads and partially because I couldn’t always find something significant to say on a daily basis. This is the primary reason I only blog once per week; there’s only so many times I can say the same thing over and over, especially if I’m in a creative rut or at a roadblock in life. Also, given how much I angst on here, I feel like I’m slipping into a habit that I’ve wanted to avoid: constant negativity. In the early days of my online presence, I tried never to post anything overly critical, or scathing, or negative in any way; if you can’t say something nice, shut the hell up, basically. There’s already so much bad stuff out there, I wanted to make sure that if I posted anything, it wasn’t going to contribute to the negativity. However, my ever-growing cynicism being what it is, any negativity that I wanted to avoid was inevitably turned inwards, and that was the perfect recipe for angst. In the year that I’ve been back on this website, I made every effort to haul myself out of the negative self-image that I wanted to leave behind, only to gradually turn around and start soaking my feet in it again.

I’m going to do better; I’m going to get myself properly motivated, I’m going to post stuff that makes people happy, and I’m going to turn my self-image back around to something positive. And in case I need a little extra motivation, there’s always Batman:

Ciao for now.

I don’t have much to say this week, so I’m going to let this song sum it up:

It’s meant to be about 2020, but it might as well be about my feelings in general lately; hopefully the weekend, and some D&D tomorrow night can help shake off the funk.

See y’all next week.

Ciao for now.

It’s November! And the Christmas decorations are already going up! What the hell is wrong with people?! It’s a dead horse joke at this point, but I refuse to let anyone think that this is normal…

In terms of art, not much to say this week; the Fifth Ace Showcase may still be a while in coming due to outside factors, but I might start throwing up some filler art here and there if I have to. If I can’t get to the stories, I can at least draw stuff that is fun to look at. I’m not going to dwell on this lest I sound like a broken record, so let me talk about something else that happened this past week.

Last Friday, my fiance and I scored a couple of free tickets for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, in exchange for her dressing up in her Foxy animatronic outfit and doing some on-site advertising before the show. As always, she was a huge hit, frightened the pants off several people and got quite a few photo ops in the process; I had a massive smile on my face watching from the sidelines as she was in her element, it’s always a joy to see. The movie itself was a lot of fun; I can’t really judge it as a horror movie, since they aren’t my preferred genre of film, but it was filled with references and easter eggs for the fans of the games, which I count myself among even if I’ll never play one of them myself (Let’s Plays and lore videos are more my speed). Horror in general isn’t something I usually gravitate towards, which made the whole experience very unique for me.

One of the big things that I’ve noticed changing through the years is the level of audience engagement in the cinema. Growing up, I was always told to quietly enjoy the movie and not interrupt anyone else’s experience; there would be the occasional group laugh at something funny and maybe some applause at the end, but that was about it. I know cinemas tend to get more rowdy in some other countries, but it’s not something that usually happens here; this is something that seems to have evolved over time. I saw it first when I watched Avengers: Endgame on the opening weekend; the cinema was packed, and every big reveal and dramatic moment was accompanied by cheers and screams, and some of them I freely participated in (you can’t blame me for whooping out loud when Captain America picked up that hammer). I figured, “Okay, that’s to be expected, it’s a story that’s been building for twenty three films, of course people will be excited.” But it’s something I noticed in FNAF as well, and I don’t think I can put it all down to fan excitement; there were certainly people laughing and cheering for fun references and cameos, but there’s something overall different about watching a horror movie in the cinema.

There’s that stereotype of people watching horror films and yelling advice to the characters on screen, all the “don’t go in there!” or “don’t touch that, nonono!” going on as they stumble into the deathtraps. Guess what? Stereotypes exist for a reason: that actually happens. I was so worried that we might be making too much noise, or speaking over other people’s experience, but it’s actually sort of expected in that setting; literally everyone was doing it, because part of the experience was the freedom to do so. We all know something terrible is going to happen to the characters, we can feel the tension building and we see the deathtrap looming, and by vocalising it, we connect with everyone else feeling the same thing. Watching a horror movie in the cinema is a surprisingly community-minded process, which I didn’t expect at all; whenever I notice easter eggs in a movie, I tend to chuckle quietly to myself and roll with it, but in a horror movie, if you don’t wince and go “ooooooooh!” out loud in unison when someone gets bitten in half by a murderous animatronic, you’re doing it wrong. I doubt that this will turn me into a horror-aficionado, but I had a good time; again, I don’t know how to judge FNAF as a horror film, but as a fan experience, it was a lot of fun.

That’s all I really have for this one; our D&D game that was set for tomorrow got pushed back a week, so I’m going to keep brainstorming characters for that; for some reason, all the ones I’ve been coming up with have low intelligence scores. Maybe I’m just tired of trying to be smart in-game, let me be a doofus for a change.

Ciao for now.